Javier waits until the other vN have noticed the woman. They are all smiling when he enters the room. It’s a big rectangle with a few skylights set in an A-frame roof. It echoes. There is a counter, and vN slide trays along the counter and push buttons and food extrudes from nozzles in the wall near the buttons. There are high shelves with things on them: more clothes, soap, little squares of foil with circles inside. The woman is being nice and friendly with everyone. She knows all their names. Hers is Angela.
All Javier has to do is grab some food bars. He walks past the crowd, and begins searching the aisles. The shelves hold all sorts of things he’s only ever heard about, so he drags his feet. Literally. Walking is so difficult. So he hops along, bouncing on his toes and skimming his squeaky new sandals along the dusty concrete.
The food is at the back of the room. It’s behind a wall of black chain-link fence that hums strangely. Arcadio has warned him about these fences – about electricity. So Javier knows that he must not touch the fence if he wants to get the food. The fence is over ten feet high. Getting over it without touching it will require a two-step jump. The walls are too wide to support a strong bounce between them. Arcadio could do it because his legs and body are longer, but Javier is still too small. This means getting a running leap at the wall and vaulting off it, backward, turning in mid-air, and landing against the shelves without making too much noise. Then doing it all over again, in reverse, and walking out like nothing has happened.
He slips the sandals off. They were a stupid idea. Why did Arcadio ask him to do this? Why did Arcadio think he could do this? He stares at the fence. He could just leave. He could just say that it’s too hard, that the fence is too high, that he doesn’t want to. And Arcadio would scowl at him and call him a pendejo, and later on he’d have another boy, a better boy, a braver boy, and that would be that.
He runs. He jumps. He bounces. He twists. He lands on the shelves. They jostle only a little.
On the topmost shelf, balanced precariously, a box teeters toward the floor. It slides down slowly, like it wants him to see it, and he pries one hand free and reaches and catches it. He is holding it when a group of bars in shiny red wrappers tumbles out of the open box, and onto the floor.
Instantly, a siren sounds, and the fenceposts begin to spark. They snap at each other, their tips glowing blue and then white, and thin ribbons of light spill out between them to touch the ceiling.
To escape, Javier will have to jump between them.
He hauls himself up to the topmost shelf. It clangs beneath him, but all he hears is the wasp sound of electricity. It’s hot. His hair stands on end. If it gets him – if he jumps wrong – he’ll die. He’s sure of it. It’ll fry him. So he simulates every possible jump. Humans are already rushing the fence. They wave something at a door in the fence and get through it. They have tasers. Javier focuses only on the forking tongues of light between the fenceposts. They are organically random. It’s hard to plot. Hard to calculate. Not now. Not now. Not now.
Now.
He launches himself. Too late he remembers to tuck in his feet; one of those forking tongues brushes his bare feet. The last thing he sees before the darkness comes is the pair of sandals he abandoned on the floor on the other side of the fence.
When the darkness rolls back, his body is stiff, and his wrists and ankles are in sticky gel-grips, and he says: “I want my dad,” and the camp foreman says Arcadio is gone, Arcadio left as soon as the alarm sounded. He shows Javier the footage. One minute Arcadio is there, waiting, and the next he’s in the air, in the trees, in the wind.
“But I’m a kid,” Javier says.
“They’ll feed you in prison, and you’ll get big,” the foreman says. “You won’t be a kid for long.”
6: Tribulations
“Well hi hi hi there,” Tyler said.
Javier opened his eyes, slowly. His vision was greyscale. Tyler was nursing some bullshit little goatee and was smoking from a pipe printed to look like corncob. He wore a Mump & Smoot T-shirt. At least, that’s what it said on it. It had pictures of clowns. Javier hated clowns. They really threw the Turing process into all kinds of hell.
“Long time no see.” Tyler smiled. His eyes were red. He didn’t smell like pot. He’d been crying. “Thought you were, uh, what’s the right word? Fragged? Decommissioned?”
“?Qué?” Javier’s mouth tasted like rust. “What?”
Tyler kept smiling. He tapped his pipe out into a matching ashtray. His mouth worked, then stopped, then worked again. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Javier’s eyes were wet. His whole body was wet. Or at the very least, damp. He was on a hammock. He was being hang-dried. He smelled like cancer.
“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it,” Tyler said. “But we’re gonna have to. At some point.” He scratched under his collar. “It’s kind of a thing, you see. Keeping you here.”
The room was an old container. It was likely a brig of some sort. There was nothing inside the room with which he could hurt himself. No sharps. No edges. Everything was soft. If he were a human being, he could have hanged himself on the hammock, but that was about it. Along one wall, in huge stencilled yellow letters, read the words: WE MUST CULTIVATE OUR GARDEN.